The concerns over net neutrality and the future of the Internet in terms of Internet access, bandwidth availability, and feasible business plans have resulted in concerns expressed by Internet Service Providers (ISPs), backbone providers, and Internet consumers.
Advocates of net neutrality assert that there should be no restrictions by ISPs and governments on content, sites, platforms, the kinds of equipment that may be attached, and the modes of communication used on the Internet.
As the public debate rages on net neutrality it seems that the future will likely hold a need to be able to provide basic Internet access as well as premium Internet access and possibly various levels of intervening access. Existing proposals assert that premium network access would be obtained by paying additional subscription fees. Such a scenario surely entails providing premium infrastructure by both ISPs and backbone providers.
The term “Internet backbone” is often used very loosely. Most users of the Internet when they hear the term backbone think of a corridor of connectivity running from the East cost to the West coast. Such is not, and never has been, the case. The interconnectivity and redundancy of the Internet relies on the association of thousands of routers owned and maintained by various “backbone providers” such as AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and others. In 2010, Comcast came to the forefront of the net neutrality conversation when it demanded fees for utilizing their backbone to carry Internet movies and other such traffic. The Internet “peering” agreement between the backbone providers generally allows competing networks to transfer traffic without charge on the assumption that each backbone carrier is providing a reciprocal service of transferring traffic.
Owners of some backbone infrastructures, such as Comcast, were feeling that they were not receiving a reciprocal arrangement that they expected and therefore wanted to start charging for certain types of traffic. While this disagreement was specific to only one backbone carrier the entire debate over net neutrality will cause more and disagreements and, in the end, probably result in backbone providers being able to charge fees for “premium service” versus the “standard service” that the general population of the Internet will enjoy.
The concept of net neutrality and backbone carriers becomes even more complex when international backbone providers are taken into account, especially when considering network traffic such as streaming movies.
One harbinger to the issues faced by ISPs and backbone providers is with the explosion of portable devices connecting to the Internet. In fact, recently the last set of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses was doled out, such that no more are available. Now, a newer version of the IP is being deployed, referred to as IPv6 to accommodate the exponential growth of devices connecting over the Internet. This issue only highlights the bandwidth concerns of the Internet as more and more devices communicate over the network.
Moreover, with high definition video becoming the norm and the ability to steam television broadcasts, the infrastructure issues are going to come more to the fore; and although tremendous advances in bandwidth have occurred, bandwidth availability is still a finite commodity.
Content providers, ISPs, and backbone providers are willing to spend large sums of capital as an investment to improve bandwidth but also want the ability to have different pricing structures for different levels of user access and service to their infrastructure for purposes of recouping on the investment.
Issues related to such scenarios for ISPs and backbone providers include: how to provide a guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) for premium infrastructure use, how to track such usage, how to manage the usage, and how to price for the usage.